[Photo: Syria is a hornet’s nest not a pinata. Credit: Daryl Cagle.]

=By= John Feffer

The war in Syria is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare for all the civilians who suffer from constant aerial bombardment, who are trapped without food and medical assistance inside crumbling cities, who experience the retribution of either the Islamic State or the regime in Damascus. It’s a nightmare for those who try to escape and face the prospect of death in transit or limbo in refugee camps. Syria is a nightmare for individuals, millions of them. But it’s not just that. If states could dream, then Syria would be their nightmare as well. Syria was once a sovereign state like any other. It had a central government and fixed boundaries. The Syrian state enjoyed a monopoly on violence and, on several occasions, deployed that violence against its citizenry to devastating effect. The economy functioned, more or less, with considerable revenue coming from the oil sector. In 2009, tourism accounted for 12 percent of the economy. Not that long ago and despite its many problems, Syria attracted a large number of eager travelers. In perhaps the most ironic twist, the Syrian state once had delusions of grandeur. It wanted to abolish the old colonial boundaries and unify the entire Arab world. Under Hafez al-Assad, its authoritarian ruler from 1970 until 2000, Syria attempted to absorb Lebanon, unite with Egypt and Libya in a short-lived Federation of Arab Republics, displace Iraq as the undisputed ideological leader in the region, and even take charge of the Palestinian cause.

How quickly dreams can segue into nightmares. Syria has fallen in upon itself, fracturing into four distinct pieces. The government in Damascus controls a gerrymandered slice of territory around the capital and the coast. The Kurds have carved out an autonomous region along the Turkish border in the northeast. The Islamic State still claims a large expanse in the heart of the country. And various rebel factions have secured a patchwork of land in all four corners of what had once been a unified Syria.

The government in Damascus, needless to say, no longer enjoys its monopoly on violence. It can’t control the borders of the country. The economy shrank by 19 percent in 2015 and will probably contract another 8 percent this year. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died in the current conflict. Out of a pre-war population of 23 million, nearly half have fled their homes—4.8 million leaving the country and 6.6 million displaced internally. The war, according to one estimate, has cost over $250 billion.

Much like the Balkans before it, Syria is emerging as a metaphor for the fragmentation and chaos that the modern world barely contains. Many states are held together by little more than surface tension, like the meniscus of liquid that rises above the sides of a glass. Nationalism has reached a boiling point in many places, as has religious extremism. Armaments are everywhere, militias are proliferating, and violence has become pervasive. After scoring a number of impressive victories—in Northern Ireland, in East Timor, most recently in Colombia—international diplomats are stymied by the breakdown of order in places like Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia. The countries jockeying for influence in Syria today face many of the same divisive forces that have torn apart that benighted country. The dream of these intervening powers: to turn the current war to their advantage. Their nightmare: that whatever is tearing apart Syria is contagious.

The Illusion of Totalitarianism

There is no such thing as a totalitarian state. Some dictators, of course, imagine that they can create just such a state, in which the government is a mere extension of the leader’s will and no significant opposition challenges this central authority. Such a society is a pyramid with one person at the top, every block serving to support that uppermost platform. Mere authoritarian societies tolerate potential rival sources of power, such as an intelligentsia or a business sector. In the ideal totalitarian system, all is for one and one is for all.

Even North Korea under the Kim dynasty—Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Eun—fails to achieve this kind of totalitarian control. True, the government has managed to suppress virtually every sign of political dissent, indigenous NGOs are practically non-existent, and all culture is subordinate to the state. However, private markets have sprung up beyond the state’s compete control (though, as a sign of grudging acceptance, the state taxes the sellers). Citizens watch contraband movies and listen to taboo music thanks to flash drives smuggled in from China. There have even been signs of disagreement at the highest levels of governance (or so the execution of Kim Jong Eun’s uncle Jang Song Thaek suggests).

Once upon a time, the leader of Syria also hoped to create a totalitarian dynasty in the heart of the Middle East. Hafez al-Assad embraced a version of Baathism, the anti-colonial, nationalist, pan-Arabist, and nominally socialist hybrid that emerged from the ideological tumult of the 1940s. As in North Korea, Assad created a one-party state with an extensive secret police, the Mukhabarat. He ruthlessly eliminated opposition, as in 1982 when the state brutally suppressed an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood. After a brief excursion into reform, the designated successor, Assad’s son Bashar, followed in his father’s footsteps. He attempted to extinguish the Arab Spring uprising just as his father had dealt with the Islamists. The current war is the result of Bashar al-Assad’s failure to perceive the declining power of his unitary state.

As much as the younger Assad would have liked to maintain a firm grip on power, Syria 2012 was a much different place from Syria 1982. During those 30 years, the bonds that had kept the country together had weakened. Popular organizations had begun to demand democracy. Groups defined by their ethnicity saw the potential for greater autonomy. Religious organizations sensed an opportunity to dislodge what had once been a distinctly secular regime. Other centers of power had appeared in Syrian society, and the Baathist regime was ill equipped to deal with this kind of pluralism.

This scenario might seem unique. It isn’t. Disharmonious pluralism has become the new global standard. Other countries—Turkey, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the EU, even the United States—gaze upon the Syrian example and tremble.

It Can Happen Here

Stripped of its magic sovereignty, Syria has been turned into a piñata whose hidden treasures are now available for all to see and seize. Even as they continue to wield their bats, the intervening powers can’t help but perceive how quickly sovereignty can disappear and how little prevents them from becoming piñatas in turn.

Turkish leaders, for instance, must be quite aware of the structural features their country shares with Syria. The glue that has traditionally held together modern Turkey—Kemalism, named for the father of Turkey, Kemal Ataturk—has a somewhat Baathist flavor. It, too, is anti-colonial, nationalist, and secular. Kemalism, like Baathism, has unified an extraordinarily diverse country. Where ideology has proven insufficient, the central government, as in Syria, has used considerable firepower to suppress any movement—but particularly the Kurds in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)—that challenges the territorial integrity of the country. Turkey’s current leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wants to consolidate power internally and project Turkish influence throughout the Middle East (and beyond). Syria has long been integral to this dual project. The two countries mended fences in the early 2000s when Syria figured prominently in Turkey’s “zero problems with neighbors” policy. Once Assad’s position became tenuous during the Arab Spring, however, Erdogan saw an opportunity to switch horses. As the conflict deepened, and no horse emerged as a clear winner, Erdogan decided to use the cover of war to bomb the PKK and their supporters over the border. He hoped to identify a “responsible” Kurdish faction with which to do business—as Ankara has done with Kurdistan in Iraq. More recently, by creating a “safe zone” in northern Syria, Turkey plans to resettle Syrian refugees now in Turkish camps and use that as a base of operations for promoting Turkish business in post-war reconstruction.

The Nightmare

That’s the dream, anyway. The nightmare is not far away. The failed coup in July was a rather inept demonstration of the latent anxiety in certain sectors about Erdogan’s consolidation of domestic power. The rekindled war with the Kurds in the southeast reveals the continued ethnic divide in the country. So far, Erdogan has cleverly combined the secularist Kemalism and the soft-pedaled Islamism of his Justice and Development Party into a Turkey-first nationalism. But blowback from Syria—from Kurds, from Islamic State supporters, from a disgruntled Turkish army—could open up a rift in Erdogan’s coalition, and Turkey would then be on the verge of turning into a Syria.

Even though it follows a very different operating system, Iran, too, looks on Syria as a cautionary example. The government in Tehran is currently split between reformers under President Hassan Rouhani and the religious hardliners who constantly fret over theological deviations. The Green Movement that emerged around the 2009 elections revealed strong opposition to the theocrats within the urban middle class. If Rouhani and his cohort are not able to take full advantage of the nuclear deal and Iran’s reentry into the global economy, Iran could slide backward economically—and then, after the next elections, politically—to the days of Mahmoud Ahmadine- jad. Disenchanted with formal politics, the next iteration of the Green Movement might give up on peaceful demonstrations and plunge Iran into its own civil war. Saudi Arabia seems like a solid enough entity at the moment. But it too faces a religious challenge from its Wahhabist fringes and a potential territorial challenge from minority Shia in the Eastern Province. The House of Saud rules with an iron fist, and its Committee for the Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice intrudes into the private lives of the citizens. The collapse of oil prices has put a squeeze on the kingdom’s finances, which will inevitably open up cleavages within Saudi society. In the absence of a strong national identity, Saudi Arabia could fracture along tribal lines, much like Somalia.

These challenges are not limited to the Middle East. The European Union faces multiple centrifugal forces —Brexit, defaulting economies, a restive Russia. Euroskeptics decry the undemocratic power wielded by political institutions in Brussels. The crisis in Syria is by no means abstract for European countries. The influx of Syrian refugees has driven a huge wedge between countries that want nothing to do with them (particularly Eastern Europe) and countries that want to share the burden equally. The disintegration of Syria is now integrally linked to the disintegration of Europe, which might seem fitting to those who believe in the vengeful ghosts of colonialism.

The United States is far away from the Syrian conflict, and so far the Obama administration has limited the number of incoming refugees to 10,000 (compared to more than a million that Europe has accepted). The issue of immigrants has certainly divided the two major presidential candidates, and there is no consensus at the top on Syria policy—the recent ceasefire agreement exposed a serious fault line between the State Department (let’s work with the Russians) and the Pentagon (really, the Russians?). But Syria won’t set Americans against Americans as it has pitted Europeans against themselves. Moreover, despite considerable disagreement in the highest reaches of American power on a range of other issues—between Congress and the president, within the Supreme Court, between states and the federal authority—these conflicts have been paralyzing rather than fissiparous.

The more serious concern is the sheer number of guns in the United States—over 300 million—and their greater public visibility. You can now carry around your gun openly in 45 states, and more than 14 million people have permits to do so. The number of anti-government militia groups has been rising steadily since the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Trust in the federal government has fallen to record lows. Approximately one in four Americans want their states to secede from the union. Divisions between rich and poor, white and black, native born and immigrants have widened. Ordinarily, all this roiling discontent could be contained by a well-functioning economy or by a set of foreign enemies to focus American enmity. But the election of a much-disliked president next year—take your pick—may well prove to be a tipping point. It doesn’t take much to turn a well-armed population into a mob.

And that, of course, is the ultimate nightmare for Turkey and Iran and Saudi Arabia and the United States—when Syria ceases to be a gloomy metaphor for what is happening outside its borders and becomes instead a grim reality.

John Feffer is the  director of Foreign Policy in Focus.

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Photo: George Soros. Credit:
Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

=By= Ekaterina Bilnova

Wikileaks’ Podesta Files shed light on US billionaire George Soros’ deep concerns about the lack of “freedom” and “constitutional democracy” in Malaysia under Najib Razak. Soros’ concerns may serve as a prelude for a series of “color revolutions” in Southeast Asia, Mathew Maavak of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia assumed in an interview with Sputnik.

The latest set of documents released by Wikileaks indicates that George Soros and his Open Society Foundation are very concerned about the situation in Malaysia, one of the US’ longstanding allies in Southeast Asia.

A memo, sent by Michael Vachon, US billionaire George Soros’ “right hand,” on March 6, 2016, to Chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign John Podesta shed light on the Malaysian “corruption crisis” and blamed the country’s Prime Minister Najib Razak for “damaging the US’ credibility in the region.”

“Malaysia could one day be a good ally of the United States in countering Islamic State [Daesh in Arabic] extremism, but not before it has achieved the freedom and constitutional democracy that its people have been denied,” the memo read.

‘There is no Business like the Revolutions Business’

“First and foremost, one needs to understand Soros and his business model,” Mathew Maavak, a doctoral researcher in Risk Foresight at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) and regular contributor to CCTV told Sputnik. “There is no business like the ‘revolutions business.’ It is more lucrative than the show business which can flop due to an unforeseen shortcoming. Revolutions, on the other hand, only need to tap into the evergreen market of public discontent. NGOs and the West-friendly media constitute a major subsidiary of the global social revolutions enterprise. Together, they seek out, identify and amplify public discontent in nations not aligned to the United States. Such US-engineered activisms have never led to more equitable societies; rather they have engendered endless bloodshed and global terrorism,” the researcher emphasized.

“A wealthy hedge fund manager can short a targeted market before executing a pre-planned ‘revolution.’ The resultant stock market and currency meltdown would provide self-evidentiary ‘proof’ to an anxious public, exerting more pressure on the government of the day to either capitulate or concede to ‘popular demands’ that are actually drafted abroad, likely by the IMF!”

“Therefore, even if a revolution fails, the subsequent economic fallout would render local assets cheap for foreign acquisition,” the researcher remarked.

Soros’ Alleged Role in Asian Financial Crisis of 1997

“The entire region was in turmoil, and the name of George Soros featured prominently in this sordid saga. The ‘Reformasi’ [protest] movement led by sacked [Malaysian] Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim — who had close to ties to Washington hawks — failed to topple the government of the day,” Maavak recalled.

“There was a good reason for Mahathir’s lack of decisiveness, apart from the occasional arrests and police raids,” Maavak suggested, “Upon stepping down from power, he used these same networks to oust his successor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and is now using the same Fifth Column to attempt the ouster of current Prime Minister Najib Razak.”

A Series of Domino ‘Color Revolutions’ in Southeast Asia

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[Photo: Chiquibul Forest Reserve near Guatemalan border: top showing significant illegal clear cuts. while the bottom shows the beginnings of cutting. Credit: Tony Rath.]

=By= Jeff Abott

Across Guatemala, indigenous communities are organizing to challenge logging in the country’s vast forests. These communities are concerned with the impact that both legal and illegal logging will have on their watersheds and on the environment.

On June 15, concerned residents from the highland Ixil Maya municipality of Nebaj, Quiche staged a protest outside the municipal building to express their concern with the steady increase in trucks leaving town loaded with lumber.

The action was organized by residents and members of the Indigenous Authority of Nebaj in order to pressure the state authorities to strip the nine companies of their licenses to exploit timber on private lands. Residents raised concern over the fact that the deforestation affects everyone in the area.

Following the protest, concerned residents in the neighboring Ixil municipality of Chajul blocked and detained several trucks transporting lumber from the region for a number of hours. They demanded that the National Institute of Forests, or INAB, and the Division for the Protection of the Environment cease their operations and described the amount of lumber being taken from the local forests as “excessive.”

The Indigenous Authorities of Nebaj also issued a statement to INAB asking them to take action. But the government body declined to act and issued a statement that they are planting new trees for every one that is cut down. But this response did not satisfy concerned residents. “We went to the government bodies and issued statements asking to cease extending licenses for the exploitation of forests,” said Caty Terraza, the communications representative for the Indigenous Authorities of Nebaj. “They told us that they are sowing new trees, but how long will it take for those trees to grow to the same size as the trees that were there before?”

The companies involved in logging operations responded to the protests by significantly reducing the number of trucks transporting lumber from mountains. According to residents, however, it is unclear if this will continue into the future.

The mobilization of communities organizing to challenge logging operations in the highlands of Guatemala represent a growing concern over the destruction of the environment by companies. This challenge to logging companies reflects the understanding of communities of the vital part forests play in the protection of the water sources.

“The trees serve us and the animals,” Terraza said. “The loss of trees is drying up the aquifers. As a youth and as human, I must think of my future, and what I’m leaving my children.” Other communities held similar protests following the actions taken in the Ixil region. On June 26, a similar action was held in Santa Cruz del Quiche, the department’s largest city. Once again protesters were demanding that authorities stop issuing licenses for the exploitation of forests.

Increase in Logging across Guatemala

Guatemala is home to vast forests and jungles, but these regions have increasingly come under threat to deforestation. Critics blame uneducated campesinos clearing land for agriculture as one of the prime culprits. This does represent a threat, but there are other bigger threats, including lumber companies, and organized crime. The protest over logging industry activity in indigenous regions occurs at a time in Guatemala of increased concern over deforestation, and comes after the historic march for water in April 2016. Community representatives, nongovernmental organizations, and activists see a connection between forests and water. The Guatemalan government, too, maintains a campaign of reforestation, but this has not stopped companies from cutting down forests for the valuable woods, or the razing of forests by narco-traffickers in the northern department of Petén to build landing strips.

The Guatemalan Ministry of the Economy actively promotes the investment of companies interested in exploiting the country’s nearly 2 million acres of forests. Logging companies and lumber traders have taken an interest in the vast forests of the highlands of Guatemala, where they can find rare hard and soft woods, such as teak, mahogany, oak and the more common pine. These resources can fetch hefty prices at market.

The exportation of lumber and products produced from wood from Guatemala has increased significantly. From 2013 to 2014, lumber exports increased 8 percent, from $6.7 million dollars to $8.6 million. This continues the long trend of the increase in the exportation of lumber and wood products, such as furniture.

But this increase in export of lumber brings the companies into conflict with indigenous communities. According to research by Guatemalan environmentalist and researcher, Juan Skinner, the indigenous regions of the country on average contain more forest cover than the non-indigenous regions of the country.

A 2005 report that Skinner authored highlights that municipalities that are less than 25 percent indigenous have forest cover of around 12 percent. Whereas regions where the population is more than 75 percent indigenous have forest cover of around 35 percent. Guatemala’s Mayan communities are not alone in their concern with the destruction of forests. The southern Xinca community of Quesada, Jutiapa has long taken steps to protect the forests that make up their communal territory. The Xinca people are one of the many ethnicities that make up Guatemala. The rural community in the southern department of Jutiapa has held their forest as communal lands since the 1850s, with subsequent generations continuing to protect the mountain and the forests. Today the forests represent 80 percent of the more than 13,500 acres of land, with the remainder utilized for crops, such as coffee and maize. “Our ancestors left us the land and a group to protect our mountain,” said Jak Mardogueo Ogorio, a representative of the communities’ Directive Council. “All this was passed down through the generations, and we continue this today. In order to cut a tree down, you first must receive permission from the council.” The community leaders have also barred any large-scale logging operations. “We don’t permit companies to operate in our forests,” Ogorio said. “In past epochs companies tried to negotiate for access to the forests, but they always wanted more. How many years for a new tree to grow? Up on the mountain there are trees that you cannot encircle with three people. This is what we are protecting.”

Ogorio and the other 13 members of the community council work directly with the residents to build awareness of the importance of the forests through regular meetings, trainings and a campaign to build alternative cooking stoves that utilize less firewood. In August and September 2016, the council implemented the insulation of 400 cooking stoves in conjuncture with Utz Che, a Guatemalan non-governmental organization.

“This project allows us to slow deforestation because the stoves use less firewood, and there is no need for more and more wood,” Ogorio said. “These stoves allow us to protect our forests.”

Community leaders of Quesada maintain vigilance over the threat of forest fires on communal lands for which they receive funding from INAB. This has generated work opportunity in a region where there are not many options.

The community of La Bendición in the southern department of Esquitla is one of the few regions on Guatemala’s southern coast not dominated by sugar and African oil palm plantations. Residents of the small community were displaced by the country’s 36-year-long internal armed conflict. At the end of the war they negotiated the purchase of a 5,500-acre coffee farm through the Land Fund in 2000 for about $1 million, far more than the value of the land.

When the families already burdened by debt arrived in 2001, they were shocked to learn that the land was not in the state that the Land Fund had promised. There were no rivers, as they were promised there would be, and the high winds meant that their crops were damaged, and there was no paved road. But there was a forest that contained an aquifer. Disappointed residents quickly left the community, leaving just 53 families of the original 170.

Residents continued to be burdened by debt, despite the rich forests. In 2002, the Land Fund proposed a solution: sell the forest. “The same Land Fund that assisted us in purchasing our land was pressuring us to sell the forests in order to resolve the debt,” said Veronica Hernandez, a 47-year-old community leader. “But we refused because if we would have sold our forests, we would have been left without water, or with contaminated water.” Since refusing to sell the land to logging interest, the community has organized to maintain the forests, and protect them from illegal logging and from forest fires. The residents also hold regular community-wide meetings to work to train everyone on the importance of the forests, and to guarantee that no one goes up into the mountain to cut down the precious trees.

Residents have also worked to develop projects like those being implemented in Quesada in order to decrease their impact on the forests. These stoves and solar projects are received across the community to great success. The residents’ resolve to protect their forest was further strengthened following the April 2016 water march, when thousands of campesinos marched to demand the protection of Guatemala’s water sources.

“The April march was important for us and other communities along Guatemala’s coast,” Hernandez said. “It has strengthened our drive to protect the forests and the mangroves along the coast.”

Despite the fact that the community was able to hold off the lumber interests following the purchase of the land, Hernandez and the other residents maintain vigilance to guarantee that no company comes to exploit their land and forests. “These companies always come into our communities to rob from us,” Hernandez said. “They then leave us with all the costs.”

Back in Nebaj, the Indigenous Authority is working to replicate the awareness in La Benedición and Quesada over the importance of forests.

“We are trying to inform community members of the impacts of deforestation,” Terraza said. This sharing of information is strengthened through the local Ixil University, which works to build awareness, and bring higher education to the region.

“But we have to do more,” Terraza added. “We must struggle to guarantee that people know what the impacts are.”

The Indigenous Authorities of Nebaj stated that they are considering other actions, including the continuation of pressure on the state bodies, including INAB, the continuation of protests, and the direct action of blocking trucks transporting lumber.

“[INAB] is an institution of the state,” Terraza said. “If we have all these trees, then it is because we have protected the forests for some time; our ancestors also protected these forests. It should not be so easy for them to arrive and issue licenses to companies to exploit the forests.”

Jeff Abbott is an independent journalist based in Guatemala

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[Graphic from the Dorian Gray Wiki Project.]

=By= Edward Curtin

“They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.  It’s hard to explain.”

                                                J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Eleanor Rigby…Lives in a dream/Waits at the window, wearing a face/That she keeps in a jar by the door/Who is it for?”

The Beatles, Eleanor Rigby

The idiocy of the Presidential election race will soon be over, as will the endless pseudo-debates and the droning of the commentators, who have been prattling on for more than a year, as if there were something to consider about this sick farce; as if the deep state had not been directing this life-movie from the start.

Gore Vidal got a laugh when years ago he referred to Ronald Reagan as our “acting president.”  But we’ve had four acting presidents since and their acts have left millions dead and wounded around the globe, including thousands of American troops. Now we have the sordid spectacle of an election campaign that is so patently phony that “delusionary” is the only word that can describe the thinking of those who take it seriously.   Many Americans have acquiesced in this ongoing tragedy, playing their parts in this deadly charade.  The ghosts of all America’s victims walk among us, and they will haunt us until we come to life by admitting our own complicity in their deaths.  The show must not go on, but it will, as long as we keep acting our parts.

Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set: “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again.  All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.”

The Obama administration repeatedly sets the stage by talking about and waging an endless war, a thirty year war, a long struggle, an open-ended war. Soon Obama’s feral, war loving understudy, Hillary Clinton, will take center stage as he exits right, after promoting her.  “This is not me going through the motions here,” he recently said.  “I really, really, really want to elect Hillary Clinton.”   The role-playing, black face of empire will be replaced by the role-playing female face of empire as the audience cheers, hiding from their masked selves their part in a face-saving, phony performance. Without a complicit audience, the performance can’t go on. But it does, or, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, “so it goes.”  But the act is wearing thin.

The autumnal season and especially the Halloween weekend of ghosts, the dead, and masks has me thinking of my own experience with acting, and how understanding the nature of our complicity in a mass act of bad faith is so important.

Having grown up as the only brother among seven sisters, I was always my parents’ favorite son.  With such dumb luck, I never felt the need to be someone I wasn’t and so accepted my favored  fate.  But from an early age I learned from my sisters what it meant to “put on your face.”  Like most girls in a cosmetic culture, they would stand or sit in front of a mirror dutifully applying lipstick, cover-up, and mascara (Italian, maschera, mask) in preparation for their entrances onto the social stage where they would face so many other faces facing and eyeing them.  Mirrors meeting mirrors, looking-glass selves.  It seemed to the boy I was, such an exhausting act.

At the time I had only a dim awareness of life the movie.

Then, when I was a young teenager, I had the great opportunity to learn how to be a public phony and put on a face.  I got to lie to a national television audience and got paid for my deception.  The show was a very popular one – To Tell the Truth – one of many game shows my parents, sisters, and I appeared on.  We were a “theatrical” family, not trained actors, but a brood of faces unconsciously hoping to discover who they were through their acts.   My parents had started this by accepting an invitation to appear on a show hosted by Johnny Carson, Do You Trust Your Wife?  (The show was later renamed Who Do You Trust? – an apt, albeit grammatically incorrect, appellation for the paranoid Cold War years.)  But I didn’t then care about politics; I just wanted to put on a good face and lie well while ostensibly telling the truth.  I succeeded by convincing two of the celebrity panelists that I was who I wasn’t – Robert McGee – and getting paid $250 for my act.  Lying seemed so easy; all you needed was a good mask and a convincing demeanor.  This was my public lesson in “putting on your face.”

Ever since then, I’ve been fascinated by masks, liars, and the role of acting on the social stage.

Ghosts of the Past by Ian Kath.

As the Halloween weekend transpires, this enchantment increases.  I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word ‘person’ being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask.  Another Latin word, larva, occurs to me, it too meaning mask, ghost, or evil spirit.  The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days.  While etymology might seem arcane, I rather think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well.  Shakespeare was right, of course, “all the world’s a stage,” though I would disagree with the bard that we are “merely” players.  It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell.  But who are we behind the masks?  Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth holes (the per-sona, Latin, to sound through).

Halloween.  The children play at scaring and being scared.  Death walks among them and they scream with glee.  The play is on. The grim reaper walks up and down the street. Treats greet them.  The costumes are ingenious; the masks, wild.  The parents stand behind, watching, smiling.  It’s all great fun, the candy sweet.  So what’s the trick?  When does the performance end?

As Halloween ends, the saints come marching in followed by all the souls.  The Days of the Dead.  Spirits.  Ghosts walk the streets.  Dead leaves fall.  The dead are everywhere, swirling through the air, drifting.  We are surrounded by them.  We are them.  Until.

Until when?  Perhaps not until we dead awaken and see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the deadly politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us.

Lying is the leading cause of living death in the United States, and the pharmaceutical companies have no prescription for this one.  Not yet, anyway, as far as I care to know.

It seems to me that Albert Camus was right, and that we should aspire to be neither victims nor executioners.  To do so will take a serious reevaluation of the roles we play in the ongoing national tragedy of lie piled upon lie in aggressive wars around the world and in election farces that perpetuate them.  The leading actors we elect are our responsibility.  We produce and maintain them.  They are our mirror images; we, theirs.  It is the danse macabre, a last tango in the land of bad actors, our two-faced show.  This masquerade ball that passes for political reality is infiltrated by the ghosts of all those victims we have murdered around the wide world.  We may choose not to see them, but they are lurking in the shadowy corners.  And they will haunt us until we make amends.

“Do you not know there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask?” warned Kierkegaard, “Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked?  Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this?  Or are you not terrified by it?”

“Whenever I take up a newspaper,” Ibsen added, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines.  There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea.  And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”

Edward Curtin is a writer and sociologist. He teaches at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.  Educated in the the classics, literature, theology, and sociology, his writing on a wide variety of topics has appeared widely over many years.  He tries to write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership.

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Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
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[Image Source]

=By= Jimmie Moglia

“… I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain,
begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind

Romeo and Juliet, act 1, sc. 4

We know of the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on crime and sundry others. Less known is the war on common sense. It is waged daily on the victims and preys of the Self-help and Actualization Movement, or SHAM. It is a 9 billion $/year industry selling verbal fluff, illusion and fraud with total impunity.

The impunity is guaranteed by the implicit and indirect association of the self-help industry with organized religion. The difference being that whereas religion sells happiness in the next life, self-help sells success in the current, under the guise of fulfilling the customer’s dreams. For, taking issue with the claims of the former is unthinkable. Hence organized religion provides a wide umbrella for all kinds of activities promising results without proof of delivery.

The army of the self-help salesmen consists of instructors with over-inflated and/or non existing credentials, veritable “riddling merchants for the nonce,”(1) promising to buyers that the winter of their discontent (2) will bloom into the summer of their satisfaction, if they purchase their advice at a considerable price.

They flatter the imagination with glittering ideas of wealth, power and ultimate fulfillment, easily obtainable by just wishing for them. Their ‘recipes’ for self-help are like Polonius’ “springes to catch woodcocks” (3) and those woodcocked by television, tabloid magazines and infomercials.

The self-help “instructors” are thousands – they deliver their pearls of wisdom, with statements like, for example, “Ya gotta want it!”  The utterer of this profound truth was Tommy Lasorda, an ex baseball player turned helper for the self-helpless. He charges or charged $30,000 an hour for advice as follows, “The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person’s determination.”

The encyclopedia of platitudes and nonsense-in-drags supplied by self-help providers would be thick – I can only quote some examples.

Here is an extract from the manual “Stop Selling, Start Partnering – The New Thinking About Finding and Keeping Customers.”

Customers learn the new mode of thought at the Pecos River Learning Center in New Mexico. The three-day course combines classroom-style learning with physically challenging outdoor activities, such as falling off walls and descending mountain walls attached to a rope. Other similar centers include self-confidence building by resisting starvation or thirst. But here is a winning ticket from the Pecos River Learning Center (italics as in the original)

“Playing to Win.
We called this spirit, visit life strategy, playing to win. Playing to Win is the alternative strategy to playing not to lose. Playing to Win has nothing to do with the conventional understanding of winning, which is that if I win, someone else has to lose. Playing to win is a personal strategy defined as going as far as you can with all that you’ve got.

The underlying tenet of blank to win is that life is about growing, accepting challenges, and never giving up. The most fulfilled, productive, and loving lives are those in which people have overcome challenges, have grown as a result, and constantly go as far as they can with everything they’ve got.
Make no mistake. Playing to win is by far the more difficult strategy, because we often need to endure a short term pain to achieve long-term gain. For example saying you want to start your own business. That usually means you must quit your current job, get a second mortgage on your home, run the risk of failing, and struggle for a few years before it pays off. In the end, if it does stay off, you get to enjoy feelings of fulfillment and success. Yet, most people, when considering the choice, shy away from commitment, from the risk and the possibility of discomfort.”

Anyone can see that “Playing to win” compounds obviousness with emptiness. Here, and in hundred similar cases, we are witnessing evidence that “The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.” (4)

And yet, it is emptiness that survives even death. When the founder of the “Pecos River Learning Center” died, in his obituary it was possible to read,

“Larry Wilson, who provided training through Wilson Learning and Pecos River Learning Center to a wide range of organizations that included Disney, the Minnesota Vikings and the CIA, has died.”

Unsaid was, however, that after the Minnesota Vikings undertook the extremely expensive training, the team arrived last in the championship of that year. We must shudder to think what results the CIA achieved, after mastering the art of “Playing to Win.”

The Pecos River Learning Center was later sold to another similar conglomerate for 16 million $.

Self-Help organizations, or self-helper individuals posing as organizations are in the thousands. I choose at random the “Option Institute.” Among many different “courses” here is the “Inner Strength Boot Camp” – a week-long program that will lighten the purse of each student of 4,650 dollars.

Baffled about a boot camp for “Inner Strength”? No problem. Here is the explanation,

quote
We’re all familiar with the term “boot camp.” An intensive, no-holds-barred, all-out, 8-cylinder experience where participants walk through the fires of deep personal challenge. And, in the end, they have rebuilt themselves into something – someone – vastly stronger and more powerful.
Inner Strength BOOT CAMP takes this concept deeper. In truth, we can go through an “outer” strength boot camp, but no amount of physical exercise prepares us for the heavy lifting we face in our lives – financially, with our health, in our relationships, and within our careers.
In the end it all comes down to Inner Strength – creating a way for ourselves to think and feel so that we have an unwavering, unstoppable, indestructible sense of our own strength, confidence, self-acceptance, and clarity. To accomplish this, we’ve constructed a course that powers through nine straight days of intensive work on you. (But you’re still only away for one workweek.)
In this course, we help you to dig deep into every aspect of yourself. Once you’ve done that, we can (lovingly and non-judgmentally) challenge you to build who you are into the version of yourself that you always wanted to be, always thought you could be, but haven’t quite seen yet.
In the end, we may not be able to control everything. But we can become people who determine how we handle everything. We can gain the tools to construct a core of strength, confidence, and clarity on the inside that’s impervious to events on the outside. We can be our own rock.
And that’s why Inner Strength BOOT CAMP isn’t about changing the world. It’s about changing YOUR world.
Would you like to:
*** Remain truly relaxed and unfazed in the face of the judgments and criticism of others?
*** Know who you are – without taking what others do personally or needing them to validate you?
*** Create more loving relationships with the people that matter most to you?
*** Overcome the obstacles that keep you from being present to what’s really important in your life?
*** Speak authentically without fear?
*** Sustain a sense of peace and comfort with an unpredictable world?
*** Stay strong in what you believe and what you want?
*** Understand exactly how you work…so you can change and rebuild the parts that don’t?
If so, Inner Strength BOOT CAMP is for you.
The way it works is that you arrive on Friday night, and then go full-blast from Saturday until the next Sunday. You will be shocked at how far you can get by taking a course in this totally immersive style (while still only being away for one workweek).
Some special methods unique to Inner Strength BOOT CAMP:
*** The Inner Strength Diary:A unique method of tracking your changes – and keeping yourself accountable
*** Happiness Interaction Training Tactics (HITTS): Practical strategies getting people to treat you the way you want to be treated while living what you’ve learned
*** The Book:The most powerful interactive exercise we’ve ever taught for learning to be totally present and focused
*** The Two Sides of You: A special activity where we use digital enhancement technology to show you sides of yourself you might never have imagined
*** What If???:A navigational path we help you create for yourself that allows you to completely trust your ability to take care of yourself – no matter what
*** The “Ask Anything” Project: A method allow you to to get to know your fellow participants – and anyone else in your life – in a unique way
unquote

And, should you still have doubts about the uniqueness of all this obviousness, there is an abundance of “testimonials.” People providing them span the range of human characters and are engaged in all pursuits that swarm upon the earth, from chef/caterers to software engineers. Here is the testimonial from a chef/caterer.

quote
I signed up for Inner Strength with a feeling that if it didn’t help, I’d be lost. Not only did the program give me practical, easy-to-use tools to help build my inner strength, it also helped me discover strengths I did not know I had. I’m now equipped to face anything in my path, and to deal with all issues with clarity and happiness. My life is no longer a battleground – it’s a playground!
unquote

But where are the roots and which are the reasons for the extraordinary success of this ultimate industry of fluff?

It is a case of “Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied…” (5) For, the idea of obtaining instructions on the ways of the world is as old as the Bible, the Greeks and the Romans. In my view, the best “self-help” manual ever written is still Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.”

More recently, in 1937 Dale Carnegie published “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” The appeal of the book, in my view, consists not so much in the advice, which is sound, but in making the reader feel better emotionally. In fact, though by and large people do not behave at all as the manual suggests, the reader realizes that cultivating humanitarian and genteel feelings towards others has some kind of official sanction – even if, in practice and too often, kindness and openness are rated as symptoms of weakness. Unless, of course the “influenced people” see profit in being influenced.

The same considerations apply to N.V. Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking.” It is amply proven that when man is no longer cold, hungry or fearful, he becomes unhappy. It is “… the unseen grief that swells with silence in the tortured soul.” (6) The book suggests measures to alleviate the symptoms.

Nevertheless, the seminal event, triggering the chain reaction of self-help mania, was the 1967 book “I’m OK – You are OK.” Which, by the way, prompted the much more realistic publication of “I am dysfunctional, you are dysfunctional.”

Yet, “There is occasions and causes why and wherefore in all things.” (7) It is not by chance that the blossoming of the self-help industry coincided with the de-industrialization of the country, the “downsizings”, the “consolidations” and the explosive growth of part-time jobs. In essence, the factual impoverishment of the country paralleled the enrichment of the financial industry, which essentially is air, or rather paper, for practical reasons. Paper can be more easily manhandled, maneuvered, hidden, stolen and monopolized, hence the dramatic divergence in prosperity between the 1% and the rest.

Unable to fight back, “the miserable have no other medicine but only hope.” (8) Searching for solutions, large sections of the populace became the natural target (or victims) of the self-help industry. Whose psychological modus operandi is as follows:

1. Dissecting the meaning of basic ideas such as right and wrong, good and bad, winning and losing etc.
2. Giving alternative new connotations to words and concepts, e.g. family, love, discipline, blame, excellence and self-esteem.

Afterwards, or as a result of this lexical sleigh-of-hand, the ‘market’ is split into two segments:

1. The victims, whose motto is “It’s not my fault”, and
2. The empowerers, whose motto is “I think, therefore I win, I daydream, therefore I accomplish.”

The victimhood syndrome has  found acceptance even outside the realm of the self-help industry. As I was writing this article, the daily newspaper of where I live, told the story of a criminal just condemned to 10 years in jail. He had stolen someone’s car, and a few days later, by chance, the rightful owner of the car spotted it in the parking lot of a store. Having another set of key, he opened the door of his car. Whereupon the thief reached him, threw him to the ground, stomped on his head and almost killed him – leaving him permanently disabled.

I think the sentence was lenient. But the defendant, with a 30-year long career in crime, brought up in his defense, his troubled childhood (i.e. “It’s not my fault.”)

But I digress.

The victimhood syndrome has also successfully instilled into people, especially women, worry, guilt, insecurity and inadequacy, turning an otherwise (possibly) uneventful life into a permanent winter of discontent.

The empowerers, or rather the sense of empowerment has convinced people that simply aspiring to do something is the same as achieving it. “Feeling good” about oneself and “positive self-worth” are more important than the much more challenging task of acquiring the skills required to gain recognition.

The “self-help” mania has a kind of counterpart, for example, in the “Jesus Festivals” held by prosperous and opulent preachers in the mega-churches of the US Bible Belt.

Yet, the desire to unquestionably accept the unbelievable runs deep in the American soul. In 1830, Frances Trollope, mother of the successful English novelist Anthony Trollope undertook a 2-year voyage to America, followed by the publication of a fascinating book, “The Domestic Manners of the Americans,” in which she also describes a religious “revival.”

“The preacher described with ghastly minuteness, the last feeble fainting moments of human life, and then the gradual progress of decay after death, which he followed through every process up to the last loathsome stage of decomposition… Suddenly he bent forward as if to gaze on some object beneath the pulpit… And the preacher made known to us what he saw in the pit that seemed to open before him. The device was certainly a happy one for giving the effect to his description of hell.
Repeatedly he invited and exhorted the young girls of the congregation not to be ashamed of Jesus, but to put themselves upon “the anxious benches” and lay their heads on his bosom.
After that, three priests walked down and began whispering to the poor girls seated at the “anxious benches”.
These whispers were inaudible to us, but the sobs and groans increased to a frightful excess. Young creatures, with features pale and distorted, fell on their knees on the pavement and soon sunk forward on their faces; the most violent cries and shrieks followed, while from time to time a voice was heard in convulsive accents exclaiming, “Oh Lord, Oh Lord Jesus, help me Jesus” and the like. Violent hysterics and compulsions seized many of them, and when the tumult was at the highest, the priest who remained above, again gave out a hymn as if to drown it.”

Trollope concludes,

“It was a frightful sight to behold innocent young creatures, in the gay morning of existence, thus seized upon, horror-struck and rendered feeble and enervated for ever.
… For myself, I confess that I think the coarsest comedy ever written would be a less detestable exhibition for the eyes of youth and innocence than such a scene.”

Returning to the present, the self-help movement has evolved from the personal realm to include the political. It is a contributing factor, for example in the adherence to the so-called political correctness, daughter of both victimization, or the culture of blame, and the self-esteem movement, a product of empowerment.

But, inspired by the vision of large profits at little or no cost, self-help (in the sense of platitudinal advise sold at high price), has branched even into hospitals and universities.

The World Health Organization now defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Starting from this platform, any reader can deduce that the sky is the limit. The Organization allocates funds to “wellness-based” models, which include research on loneliness and special after-school play programs, all aimed at achieving the ‘state of perfect health.’

Through the same reasoning, public health official have invested millions in so-called “outreach programs” for drug abusers. Here is a declaration by an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, on the subject of women of color contracting HIV from dirty needles and unprotected sex, “In response to daily assault of racial prejudice and denial of dignity, women may turn to readily available mind-altering substance for relief. Seeking sanctuary from racial hatred through sexual connection as a way to enhance self-esteem, also may offer rewards so compelling that condom use becomes less of a priority.” It’s pure victimization at work, and out go the millions for other self-help programs, as their respective deliverers laugh all the way to the bank.

Even mid-sized companies engage high-priced lecturers to inspire motivation through ‘positive thinking,’ though there is no evidence of any positive effect. Considering that often, the company promoters of these program are the very ones who contradict the principles that the programs are supposed to inspire.

Or take the case of the sales seminar where the trainer tells 250 real-estate professionals from the same company that all of them could be the number one salesmen of the year. Self-help can even defy the most simple of mathematics. One of the salesmen will be, the others won’t.

Self-help has surreptitiously changed at large the general outlook on life. From, “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill go together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues” (9) to the philosophy embodied in the popular bumper sticker ‘BADASSE’ – Blame All Disappointments And Setbacks On Someone Else.”

By default, design, skill or luck, the self-help industry has found the formula for ‘success.’ Familiar sounding words applied in a different context puzzle the will (as in the example above, “Inner Strength Boot Camp.”) And hyperbolical images that fire the imagination prompt the willing victim to believe the unbelievable rather than accepting the inherent uncertainties of life.

In the end, self-help makes cowards of its victims, whose hue of resolution is sicklied over by the pale cast of thought, (10) or rather, by the evanescent and ridiculous promises destined to melt into air, into thin air. While the baseless fabric of the self-help visions, (11) the promised successes, praises, glories, wealth and happiness, dissolve, and leave only expensive bills behind.

And, as writer Steve Salerno has aptly concluded in his book SHAM, from where I extracted some of the examples, “The Self Help Industry has made America Helpless.”

** 1. King Henry IV, part 1
** 2. from King Richard III
** 3. Hamlet
** 4. King Henry V
** 5. Romeo and Juliet
** 6. King Richard II
** 7. King Henry V
** 8. Measure for Measure
** 9. All’s Well That Ends Well
** 10. from Hamlet
** 11. from The Tempest

In the play (original quote). Mercutio is delivering a long-winded description of fairy Queen Mabe and Romeo pleads for a halt to the nonsense.

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?